The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [88]
12
How We Buy Back What Money Stole
The rise of wealth has allowed for the development of technology and its wide distribution in the population. Most everyone has televisions and stereos; we have air-conditioning, computers, movies, and video games. Through history, even reading was a group activity, as there were not many copies of texts and not many competent readers around. People used to leave the house because they were bored and someone outside might be gossiping or playing a guitar or throwing a ball around; because the apartment was crowded; because the house was hot and the front stoop had a nice breeze (or the lodge had a good fan); to keep an eye on the kids in the street, who were out there because they were similarly bored, hot, or crowded at home; or just to flirt, or brag, or argue with someone. Trying to be entertained by other people is exhausting, though. They tease, they drone on, they criticize, they fail to show up, they borrow money and don’t return it, they tell your secrets but are furious when you tell theirs. For most people, throughout most of history, there was no real choice.
In the second half of the twentieth century, for many people, staying at home became comfortable and sufficiently distracting. Many studies have shown that human beings do better when they have a lot of friends and family that they see a bunch of times a year. Yet when every family in town has a television and a computer, and perhaps even every person in every family has a television and a computer, people get isolated. We see famous people and we know who they are, but they do not know who we are. Not only does money allow people to sequester themselves in comfort, the pursuit of money forces people to work a lot rather than take part in the kind of casual leisure that builds community. Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone uses the working-class sport as a symbol of what he calls a collapse of American community, highlighting that we do still bowl, but because the leagues are gone, we now bowl alone. Putnam sees this as an alarming threat to “educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.”1 Shopping, sports, and television are what count for public fun these days. It is not exactly ironic that, having allowed us to massively desert the old associational world, abundant consumerism is now at the center of what we manage to participate in, publicly, and manage to talk about with friends and strangers alike. Media entertainment is a big part of how money stole the middle section of association. It lured us off the front stoops and porches, away from the clubs and halls. Our great public behavior now is shopping, but sports and television shows are also important in replacing our associational calendar and public conversation.
Like historical events based in religion, politics, and township, the game of watching sports has rituals, parties, heroes, and opportunities to scream your lungs out, slap hands with your neighbors, or suddenly embrace one another in a fit of joy. But that is mostly true if you go to the game, or at least to a sports bar, or to a friend’s house to see the game. That is, to get a real rich associational experience out of watching sports, you generally have to leave the house, and most people don’t: they watch the game at home on television. Money creates high-stakes situations out of all sorts of pastimes that were once more about social play. Once, baseball teams were chosen by location: a shop’s workers and their friends. As soon as there was money in it, teams hired ringers,